


Two Sides Of A Snake's Life

by EssayOfThoughts



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Origin Story, Alternate Timelines, Character Study, Curses, Gen, JKR's Recent Lore Is Rubbish And I Disagree, Nagini Was Always A Snake, Nagini as a Maledictus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-14 06:51:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16487807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: In one world there is Soo-hyun. Korean. Muggle. Cursed as a Maledictus to be a sideshow attraction.In another world there is Nagini, forever and always a serpent.





	Two Sides Of A Snake's Life

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [obscuro_2018](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/obscuro_2018) collection. 



> This was written because I am pissed off beyond belief about the whole Nagini-Maledictus-Korean Woman as a Neo-Nazi Metaphor's Soul Anchor bullshit JKR's just pulled out of her gaping behind.
> 
> I also very much want to know how a Korean woman with an Indian name ended up in France being abused by someone who may be Scandinavian and under a Latinate curse. That just drips with Colonialism, exoticisation and related narratives to me, and it skeeves me out. So I decided to give Maledictus-Nagini a story and desires of her own. I.e. to get the fuck out and be more than someone else's puppet. This could probably be even better handled by someone other than me and I'm more than happy to get feedback on ways this could be improved but mostly this is me attempting to give Maledictus-Nagini some serious characterisation that JKR's story - where she's a secondary character - is almost certain to deny her.

Soo-hyun is sixteen years old and she knows one thing above all else. Olafur Skender, the strange white man demanding hospitality from her parents, scares her beyond belief.

He has magic, she knows, but he does not act as the _mudang_ and _baksu_ do - with practicality and honour, without pushing beyond bounds of propriety. But then, Skender is from the West, where secrecy has long been paramount. Here in Korea magical and mundane exist side by side. For now, at least.

Skender rattles around Soo-hyun’s parents' house, loud and brash and rude, poking his head into every room without warning. His circus is housed down the road - they’re travelling back from China, he says, with a huge _Zouyu_ trapped in a cage that he says is a gift from a most impressed Lord.

Soo-hyun doubts that. Her parents aren’t impressed - not with how Skender has cursed Mother to obey his every whim, spelled Father so he can’t do anything to stop him. The amulets the _mudang_ gave them before she travelled on only protect against bad luck and terrible beasts. They don’t protect against Skender’s stick or his spells, or his twisted mind.

Soo-hyun is sixteen years old. Above all else, she _hates_ Olafur Skender.

 

* * *

 

Nagini is laid in a nest in the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy. The monks sing and chant in their chambers, but out in the grounds, under a fig tree, Nagini’s mother lays her eggs one by one. Coiling in circles, she sings.

Sings history songs - tales of their species, descended of the Naga Kaliya as he travelled from India to Fiji. Tales of other serpents - of Basilisks, kings and queens of them all, of the Naga who can take human form, from which they claim descent and for whom she’s named for, of the Vritra-ahi causing drought, of Dipsa, tiny and deadly, and of Scitalis who can hypnotise all who watch them. Tales of humans, of those few who can speak to them.

Nagini coils, contented in her egg, and listens to the songs her mother sings.

 

* * *

 

Soo-hyun is seventeen and above all else she _hates_ Olafur Skender. Years later, paraded out in her cage, she remembers this day, the last time she saw her parents. The day Skender finally packed up his things to leave, bowed his thanks to her parents and demanded “a little trinket for my travels.”

After hosting him for half a year, her parents had very little left that they could give him. Everything they offered up, he turned down with a greedy smile.

“What about her,” he asked, and nodded in her direction.

Soo-hyun, at the end of the line of her siblings, shook. She was her parents youngest daughter. Their treasure, Mother liked to say. The balm of their increasing age.

Skender strode over, grabbed her by the arm. Pulled her out into the courtyard.

“Such a beautiful girl,” he said. “But how to exhibit you?”

And he’d cast a spell. Long. Latinate. Some weaving thing that coiled around her like a snake, twisted its way into her skin and wrapped around her bones.

“A Maledictus,” he said as she crouched on the floor, her stomach twisting like a knot of snakes. “The perfect new attraction.”

She vomited. Her breakfast splattered onto the stone. When she’d retched again her whole body had shuddered. Had _twisted._

And then she was a snake.

 

* * *

 

Nagini travels. She meets many snakes, some of them children of Kaliya as she is, and others of them cobras, kraits, rock pythons and vipers. They share stories and songs and Nagini travels on. She meets other snakes with her name - firstborn and first-hatched daughters, mostly, but one python who was the only one of her clutch to survive.

She travels. She doesn’t know where she’s travelling to, just that she has to travel. The Journey all snakes make.

This is how she ends up on a boat.

She thinks she regrets the boat. It roils beneath her and no matter how much she coils it keeps on moving like an elephant plodding along. It’s very uncomfortable. There’s plenty of food, but it’s hard to keep down.

When everything finally settles and Nagini slithers off, the desire to travel remains.

Its cold. Its wet. There’s no sign of sun.

Nagini pulls on what magic all Kaliya-born serpents have, and travels north.

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t know what a Maledictus is. All she knows is that it’s a thing forced on her, a thing that she is made to be. She doesn’t know magic. She doesn’t know Latin beyond enough to recognise it. She speaks just enough English to get by and so, glaring out of her cage at the man who cursed her, she decides to learn.

Skender is a man. A wizard. Someone with power, and who wants more power. Someone who cannot be trusted. But, she knows: not all of his exhibits are caged forever. His stories have him ranging from Ireland to America, from Sweden to Spain, from China to Sri Lanka - and she has little doubt that that’s where he encountered the name he foists onto her.

“Nagini,” he says. “My pretty she-snake.”

She spits at him.

No matter what he says or what he claims, she will always and forever be Soo-hyun, her parents daughter. She refuses to let him make her something else.

 

* * *

 

England, she learns, is the shore she’s landed on. She’s informed of this by Nicor, a snake as black as she is, with paler grey diamond markings down his back. “Are you on your Journey too?” he asks, when he’s been following her two days. “It’s only, it helps if you know what you’re looking for.”

Nagini turns to glare at him. “It’s the _Journey,”_ she says. “Half of the point is that we do not know what we seek.”

Nicor shakes himself, looks almost unbearably smug. She reminds herself why she puts up with him: he, unlike her, knows this country, and how to tell when it’s dark cold waterways are too cold for them to bear.

 _“You_ may think that,” he says. “Strange foreign thing. But we Naedres know to know what we look for.”

Nagini’s tongue darts out like a sigh and she turns back to continue travelling. “You can think that,” she says. “But my mother taught my siblings and I that the journey is as important as where you arrive. You learn things as you travel that are needed for your goal.”

Nicor, still cheerful, catches up without issue. Then again, he is almost twice her length. Kaliya-born can afford to grow slowly, Naedres here in this cold land, cannot. “Maybe,” he suggests, “This is one of the things you need to learn.”

Nagini stops completely. “I hate you.”

Nicor shakes again, pleased. “I know. But think. What is it that you want? What is it that our magic might be helping you to find?”

Nagini, all of six inches long, looks at the foot-long Naedre. “I want,” she says. “To change the damn world.”

 

* * *

 

They travel. Soo-hyun picks up languages - the English that Skender tends to use, but also pieces of Swedish and from that the Danish of the Askafroa he keeps in a portable arboretum. She learns bits and pieces of Albanian and Serbian and fragments of Russian, and from the other exhibits she learns how to swear in Japanese (the Oni, Kidomaru, is a surprisingly gentle soul when treated with kindness), and how to convince the firedrakes to spy for her. With Nigelle she improves her English and learns Creole French.  From Sanjeev the Abarimon she learns Hindi and Urdu on the days she’s assigned to help recycle his air.

Abarimon, she learns, cannot breathe the air outside of their valleys and she thinks this yet another cruelty that Skender has inflicted on those around her.

They travel back towards Europe, through countries still fighting over who and what they are to those which already know. They are displayed over and over, in Sofia, in Budapest, in Istanbul and in Moscow. In Russia, they are all examined by a Kukudhi vampire, gold and jewels dripping from his fangs, and he paces along Skender’s cages, murmuring approval. He pauses at hers.

“A muggle Maledictus?” he asks. “How much for her?”

Skender holds out a hand. “She’s not for sale.”

“Her blood-” the Kukudhi says.

“Is also not for sale.”

He does this, Soo-hyun knows, not out of kindness. He does this because she is his creation and his toy and his pet. He does this because, as far as he’s concerned, she, like all his other caged trinkets, are _his._

 

* * *

 

She loses Nicor somewhere up in Yorkshire. He simply lifts his head, scents the air, and goes off in another direction.

“I’ve found it!” he trills when she asks what the hell he thinks he’s doing. “I know where I’m going!”

“Nicor-”

He pauses, coils halfways back over himself to look back to where she’s trying to catch up.

“You’re not going this way?” he asks.

Nagini shakes her head. “It’s not part of my Journey,” she says.

For once, Nicor is silent. The grass of the field they’re in is thick and dark and even with Nicor pulled to his full height it towers over him.

“I’ll miss you,” he says. He dips his head, darts his tongue out to scent the crown of her head. “Travel safely,” he says. “And may we see each other again.”

Then he’s gone before she can say anything further. Nagini shakes herself free of cold, pulls on her magic, and finds the pull of her Journey.

North, still. Towards the cold.

She half-wishes that the Journey would take her East as it did Nicor. At least then she wouldn’t _freeze._

 

* * *

 

More than enough times he’s had her transform just to drape over his arms and make a show. Had her drape over his shoulders like a scaled boa rather than the feathered ones some of the dancers wear, only to slither off and transform back to human.

She hates this. She’s learned now, just what a Maledictus is. The Kukudhi, desperately trying to prise her away from Skender had told her any number of things. Half of them were not true, but other clients are more willing to discuss with honesty, if only they get to see her transform without the bars of a cage between them.

“It’s so sad,” one of them says - a tall blond man with a snake-headed cane, his hand stroking along a scaled snake cheek. “That one day you will be stuck in this form forever.”

She’d turned back as quickly as lightning.

_“What.”_

The man - Abraxas Malfoy, she found out later - frowned. “Don’t you know what you are?”

 _I’m from Korea,_ she thinks. _I’m what you’d call a muggle, and look down on. I know the name of what I am and that I can turn into a snake. Do you think Skender told me anything else? Can’t you see the bruises?_

Malfoy tells her no more, but the Veela Argella de Melusine does when they’re in Toulouse.

“Some say that we are born of Maledicti who found a cure for what they are,” she says. “A group of Maledicti who were cursed for their beauty and for denying their beauty to others, all forced to become birds until they lost who they were. For Seven upon Seven years would we change and when the forty-ninth came, we would turn no more.” She shakes her head. “But I do not think it is true. If it were, I would take you from here myself, and cure you. But there are no spells for that.”

Soo-hyun learns: she is under a Blood Malediction. Any children she has will carry the curse too. Depending on the curse used, it will manifest in any of her children, or only in daughters. She learns: she can turn into a snake and any children she has will also turn into snakes down and down the generations until the curse is worn out and finally breaks. She learns: she can turn into a snake for only so many years and one day she will become a snake and never turn back. That, one day, she will lose her human form and her human mind and be nothing more than a mindless serpent.

She doesn’t know how many years she has. A multiple of seven, Argella de Melusine seemed to think, but no one knows.

She’s a muggle, after all. She has no magic to call  her own. No magic she can use to fight this off.

The only magic she has is the magic that will one day kill her.

Soo-hyun is twenty-seven years old. She’s not seen her parents in ten years.

More than anything else in all of the world, she hates Olafur Skender.

 

* * *

 

She’s tired. She’s so tired. The cold is biting and its constant, even the magic she pulls on strains to hold up against the temperatures so far below anything she’s used to.

But the Journey pulls her onwards.

She wonders if the Journey means death for her. If what she desires, to change the world, is something that she cannot ever have and so the Journey seeks to kill her.

If that is the case, she thinks, it could have done it in a far simpler way than having her cross oceans and sick up ship’s rats.

She’s half-delirious with cold when she feels warmth again. The forest was shaded from snowfall, at least, but the Journey pulled her onwards, didn’t dare to let her rest. Cold soil and cold grass, and frost and snow, and cold _cold_ stone and then…

 _Warmth._ A delicious, delectable puddle of it beneath a flaming torch and Nagini finally has strength to push the Journey _away,_ Kaliya damn it, because she needs this. The warmth. A chance to rest.

She’s dozing when a voice wakes her.

“What are you doing here, precious?”

She scents the air, looks around with eyes so very hesitant to open up - it’s so warm, so very warm. All she scents is cold and smoke and human. Not a scent of a snake anywhere.

“Confused, sweetling? Never talked to a Parselmouth before?”

She darts back. She’s heard that word before, Nicor thought it a myth. The old cobra she travelled out of Kandy with claimed to have met one. The king snake, caged on the boat, claimed his master was one. Once, after Nicor had left, she heard a grass snake telling the myth of it to itself. Her mother had sung of it.

She remains silent. A human, speaking to snakes. She doesn’t quite believe it.

“Come on, sweetling, talk to me. I shan’t hurt you.”

She chokes back a hiss of laughter. She smells that he is honest and that he is smiling and his hand is warm against her scales as he reaches down to lift her up.

Compared to the distant warmth of the torch, he’s blazing like a fire.

She coils up his arm, slithers up his sleeve, and wraps herself around his neck - loose, because she doesn’t want to choke this interesting person when her Journey has finally quieted so much, but close enough she can feel the pulsing warmth of his blood.

“Do you have a name?” he asks, and his hand is warm under her chin, fingers gently rubbing.

“Nagini,” she replies.

She smells him smile again - she realises, now, that though he smells human, there’s an edge of snake to everything. It’s how she knows he’s smiling.

“Nagini,” he says. “Sweetling. Would you like a mouse?”

 

* * *

 

Soo-hyun is thirty-three when she loses herself entirely. When she transforms into a snake in her sleep and coils off. She doesn’t know who she is any more. She isn’t Nagini, though, that she holds to. But over time - so much time or so little she’s not sure - she loses even that, until only _Nagini_ is left to her.

 _Nagini_ and how much she hates those who would curse her and hers.

She finds Skender by scent, coils around him and bites.

He chokes, and coughs, and dies in his sleep, two great tearing fangmarks opening his neck from ear to ear.

If she still had her human mind, she’d know they would blame the vampires.

She doesn’t care. She travels far and wide, and hurts those who would hurt her.

Until one day she hears a whisper.

 _Sweetling,_ it says. _Such a pretty thing. Would you like to help me change the world?_

A ghost - a faint, inhuman, human thing - floats over to her.  _Would you like power?_ it asks.

 _Yes,_ Nagini hisses back.  _Power to protect myself._

 

* * *

 

Nagini helps Tom to master the school, and master his men. She helps him hold his soul apart - shed little pieces into other bodies like a snake sheds its skin.

She helps him to change the world.

When, one day, he vanishes, she feels something she has not felt in years.

She feels the Journey, pulling her.

It's pulling her east.

She travels and she knows, this time, what she will find.

 

* * *

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Soo-hyun is the personal name of Claudia Kim, the actress who'll be portraying Maledictus-Nagini in the new Fantastic Beasts Film. Olafur is the personal name of Skender's actor. 
> 
> Mudang and Baksu are terms for Korean Shamans. Zouyu is an alternative transliteration of Zouwu, one of the new beasts of the Fantastic Beasts films.
> 
> The Temple of the Tooth in Kandy is in Sri Lanka. Its a real place and pretty damn amazing to see in person. It houses one of the teeth of Buddha, who was protected by the Naga Mucalinda from a storm once he reached enlightenment.
> 
> Kaliya is a Naga from myth who was defeated by Krishna and so left to travel to Fiji.
> 
> Vritra-Ahi are taken from The Monster Blog of Monsters, over [Here](http://themonsterblogofmonsters.tumblr.com/post/120563172624/vritra-ahi-a-large-water-snake-found-in-india), as are Dipsa - [Here](http://themonsterblogofmonsters.tumblr.com/post/110018739069/dipsa-for-all-its-tiny-size-the-dipsa-is-one-of) \- and Scitalis - [Here](http://themonsterblogofmonsters.tumblr.com/post/107937247833/scitalis-known-for-the-striking-lines-of-colour). Nædre's are also from Monsterblog, from [Here](http://themonsterblogofmonsters.tumblr.com/post/125293749174/n%C3%A6dre-possessing-of-colour-changing-eyes-the-n%C3%A6dre). The name Nicor comes from the etymology of Knucker, a kind of water serpent in English folklore.
> 
> Askafroa are Scandinavian tree spirits, which you can read about over [Here](http://themonsterblogofmonsters.tumblr.com/post/171571778318/askafroa-dryadic-creatures-native-to-sweden). Kidomaru is the name of an Oni from Japanese folklore. Nigelle le Narcissique is one of the exhibits of the Circus Arcanus, a _Homo amphibia_. I draw from [This](http://themonsterblogofmonsters.tumblr.com/post/166123587962/homo-amphibia-homo-amphibia-also-called-loveland) interpretation. Abarimon are also exhibits of the Circus Arcanus. Mentioned in Pliny they are said to be beings found in a single valley in India, who cannot breathe any air but that of their home valley. Kukudhi Vampires are from The Monster Blog of Monsters, over [Here](http://themonsterblogofmonsters.tumblr.com/post/172323559948/kukudhi-upyr-a-sub-bloodline-born-of-the).
> 
> Several pieces from the Nagini-snake sections draw on some of my old submissions to LALW, specifically [This One](http://livesandliesofwizards.tumblr.com/post/73787515969/she-had-started-life-as-a-small-thing-a-tiny-dark) and [This One](http://livesandliesofwizards.tumblr.com/post/76057288146/people-never-wondered-why-the-entrance-to-the).


End file.
